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At this week's group meeting, the Victorian ghost stories team mapped out what we plan on accomplishing for our midterm. By Friday of next week, we will have designed and uploaded our preliminary webpages for the project website, and we will have completed all story markup for the ghost stories that we are analyzing.

Students in our course have often gone on to teaching careers, so when Teach for America asked me to post a recruitment announcement about their work, I agreed to do so. Please see below, and if you are interested in receiving more information, please visit http://teachforamerica.org or get in touch directly with the University of Pittsburgh Teach for America Campus Campaign Coordinator, Emily Fecile, 610-368-6137, ekf9@pitt.edu.

This coming Wednesday, October 26, Dr. Raffaele Viglianti will be presenting a guest lecture in our course about digital musicology, and he will also be delivering a more general public lecture in the Humanities Center (601 CL) at 4:00 p.m. In connection with these events:

This week the Dante’s Inferno team made some progress! After developing our topic and initial hypothesis last week, we created research questions that provides a general description- what the project entails and what we hope the outcome/goal will be. You can find our research question/explanation here: https://github.com/MeghanBan/The-Divine-Comedy/blob/master/misc/Research...

We are about a week behind the Victorian Ghost Stories group in terms of mark-up and schema development because we were waiting on a few places to see if we could get access to an already marked-up version (we didn't). So, this week Jessica will design the schema and the proof of concept mark-up samples. I (Emma) will be writing up the official research question (finally). Meghan is doing preliminary text clean-up and Nikki is doing the outline for our web structure and planning the CSS.

We had such a productive week! This past week, David created our schema (VictGhostStories/data/schema_ghost_wade.rnc), which includes the scariness scale of 0-3 as an attribute. We settled on this scale because it offers four different options: "1" for not scary, "2" for a little scary, "3" for very scary, and "0" words that would be scary in a different context. After Kaylen talked to Na-Rae Han, they determined that our scale and factor were too objective, so we will be using WordNet to determine the relationships between the words we identify as scary.

Upon meeting this week, all of our group members had read the five ghost stories that we plan to analyze in our project. Having a common framework to work from enabled us to finally condense our various interests into our primary research focus, which will involve examining how female authors of the Victorian era use language to build suspense. We began to think about what our schema would look like and what we would tag. We plan to tag typical elements like paragraphs and characters, but also more specialized elements, such as those that relate to plot development and suspense-building.